Tutorial 5.3: Custom website reports

This is the detailed tutorial for website Reports.

What is a Website Report

Website reports in the system are reports that you can create to drill into your traffic and visitor information for your website. You should create a few reports just to get a feel for the report generator and to understand its scope. Find it under Reports->Create a Website Report.

Every website report allows you to first choose filter criteria, then choose a date range for that report.

Example Uses of Website Reports

You can use website reports to extract information about the visitors to your website and their behavior.

• Find out how much traffic your website received from one specific date to another - i.e 2-August-2008 to the 13-August-2008.
• Measure how many visitors came to your website via another website or a search engine.
• Find out how many visits you get from a particular country.
• Find out how many of your visitors use which operating system or browser.
• Measure your store's shopping cart abandonment rate.
• Find out which search bots are visiting your site and with what frequency.

Creating a Website Report

To Create a Website Report, we start by going to Reports->Create a Website Report, then clicking "Create a new Website Report".

Choosing your Filter Fields

When you create a new website report, you are presented with "Filter by Fields". Filters are just like they sound - they allow you to cut out or "filter" certain data out of or into your report, based on the "filter field" you choose.

Remember you can filter by a date range in the next step. If you only want to filter by date, you can leave all filters unselected and simply click "Next" at this step.

Each filter field has a slightly different meaning.

Source filters by the source of the visitor - i.e where they were before they came to your site, or how the got to your site. It can be one of several options.

• Direct. Direct means they came to your site by typing the address in directly or through other direct means.
• Referral. Referral means that the visitor was referred to your site from another site i.e they clicked on a link to get here.
• Search Engine. Search Engine means they got to your site from a search engine such as Google.
• Campaign. Means that the visitor came to your site via an Email campaign or via an advertising campaign.
• Affiliate. Means the visitor came to your site via an affiliate link.

Visitor filters by the type of visitor. This can either be "Human" or "Bot". Bots are computer programs that visit your website, these are usually search engines but can also be other computer programs.

Platform and Browser refer to the operating system (Windows or Apple Mac and so on) or the web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and so on).

Spider refers to the names of specific, known "bots". With the "Spider" field you can find out how many times a specific computer program - such as the famed Googlebot - visited your site.

Country refers to the country that the visitor is browsing from.

Tutorial: Reporting on Visits from a Country Using Custom Website Reports

First create a Website report as described above.

Choose our Filter Criteria

In this step, we choose fields to filter by. Since we want to find out how many people are visiting our website from a particular country, choose "Country" as the Filter By Field, and then select "United States".

As you might imagine, this will show us how many visits our website got from people who are inside the United States. Note that if I changes "equals" to "not equal to" I could get the reverse - all visitors who were from outside the United States.

View Your Report

Now you are presented with your website report. You can can now change the time period that you are reporting on, or the granularity of the report, as well as the two measures of your traffic: Visits and Page Views.

• Page Views are how many pages have been viewed. This does not take into account who has viewed the pages - so the same person viewing the same pages multiple times all count as separate page views.

• Visits. Visits are like groups of pageviews that occurred within a certain time frame and are related to one particular visitor. Imagine you go to a website and you surf through that website in 10 minutes. You might view 8 different pages, and possibly go back and forth from the home page into the site's sub pages. Now, while you have seen many pages, this would only be counted as one visit. If you were to go back and surf the site again the next day, the time threshold for the first visit (nominally 1 hour) will have expired, so this will be counted as a second visit.

Exporting Your Report

Once you are happy with your report, you can export the results into an Excel Spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet will contain the data in tabular format, similar to the table you see below the graph.

Save Your Report For Later

Now you can save your report. Click Next, and then you'll able to enter a meaningful name for your report.

And next time you go to Reports->Create an eCommerce Report, your report will be waiting for you!

N/A